ABOUT
ELHAM ESHRAGHIAN-HAAKANSSON
Elham Eshraghian-Haakansson (she/her) is an award-winning Iranian–Australian video artist, researcher, writer, director working across film, cine-theatre, Virtual Reality (VR), and immersive multi-channel installations. Her practice navigates inherited stories and post-memory within displaced communities, using the poetics of moving image and world-building to transform audiences from passive bystanders into witnesses. Her cinematic work has been exhibited nationally and internationally receiving major recognition including the Dr. Harold Schenberg Art Prize (2018, PICA Hatched alum), 14th Arte Laguna Special Prize Award (2020), Invitation Art Prize (2020), Ellen José Art Prize (2022), and finalist with special commendation for the Jim Sharman Future Award (2025). She is the inaugural recipient of the Forrest Research Foundation Early-Career Creative and Performance Leadership Fellowship (The Virtual Architecture of Empathy, PICA, 2022) and a Directing Fellow with Encounter Theatre (2024). As co-founder, and Creative Director of the Second Generation Collective, she advocates for bridges between empathy-led social practice and the digital arts. The collective was awarded the Visual Arts Craft Strategy Major Commission with PICA and Creative Australia for Vádye Eshgh (Valley of Love) (2025). Her debut theatre play A love letter to the Nightingale (Blue Room Theatre, 2024) and companion VR art work (BAFTA-Qualifying Aesthetica Short Film Festival; Ruthin Arts Festival, 2024) exemplify her cross-disciplinary vision. In 2025, she was selected for the national exhibition Neighbours at the Gate (National Art School, 2025).
Critics Choice 2024 Kelly Fliedner for Art Magazine 2024
Drew Kendell Photography
CREATIVE TEAM
Elliott Nieves
Director of Photography | www.elliottnieves.com
SECOND GENERATION COLLECTIVE
The Second Generation Collective explore stories of refugee-ship, migration and identity in Boorloo. Founded by Elham Eshraghian-Haakansson and Asha Kiani in 2020, the artists comprise of migrants who fled Iran during the 1979 Revolution, and their children who have grown up on Noongar Boojar. The collective explores their experiences of displacement, resettlement, heritage, home, grief, and faith. Against the backdrop of dual identity, they confront the push and pull of cultures in order to uncover the past and embrace the present. By acknowledging communal traumas and bridging intergenerational gaps, their thoughtful multi-disciplinary artforms evoke an empathic lens within the viewer.
Through a lens of authentic curation and communal care, Kiani and Eshraghian-Haakansson created this initiative by engaging with philosophies that ask: how can we live as a complex, unified whole, where differences are embraced, and diversity is celebrated? How do we create a compassionate foundation from which our truths are heard and acknowledged? What does it take to truly understand the process of healing in our communities?
The projects and artworks that emerge from the Collective aim to untangle the fragments of what it means to listen and understand moments of suffering, hardship, hope and faith in the human experience; to embrace the universality of grief and normalise expressing our truths so that xenophobia, estrangement and apathy are replaced with connection, empathy and oneness.
www.secondgenerationcollective.com
Photography Duncan Wright